The Fate and Vigilance of Villages in the Process of Urbanization
Mencius said: "In death or removal, none should leave the village; the fields of the village share the same well. Going out and coming in, they are companions; in watching and guarding, they help one another; in sickness, they support one another; then the common people are affectionate and harmonious." This is an accurate portrayal of the production and lifestyle of rural China over thousands of years. And villages can be said to be the comprehensive carrier that bears, records and perpetuates this traditional agrarian civilization. General Secretary Xi Jinping said we should "remember the nostalgia," and its foundation and cultural context come from "villages." However, since entering the new century, China's rapidly advancing urbanization has been striking the ancient villages with unprecedented force, with nearly 200 natural villages disappearing every day nationwide. And the large number of "new villages" that have sprung up are neither village nor city, not only losing the "watermelon" of excellent rural culture but also failing to pick up the "sesame seeds" of modern urban civilization. Against this backdrop, what kind of village we should build is indeed a major issue before us.
From March 31 to April 4, a group of 4 of us went to the three cities of Chengdu, Ya'an and Meishan in Sichuan to conduct special research on the issue of village construction. The relevant situation is reported as follows.
1. What should villages be built like?
What should rural areas be built like? What counts as a modernized, upgraded new countryside? Through building "new rural complexes" and "new village residential clusters," renovating and upgrading traditional villages, protecting historical and cultural dwellings, and at the same time actively yet prudently exploring new village construction, Sichuan's many concepts and practices are inspiring and worth summarizing.
On the morning of April 2, we researched two villages in Pidu District of Chengdu, Zhanqi Village in Tangchang Town and Anlong Village in Ande Town, both newly built villages formed by demolishing courtyards and merging courtyards. Today's Zhanqi Village, as a pilot village for building new rural complexes in Sichuan Province, is a new rural community formed by demolishing and merging more than 400 formerly scattered farming households. Walking into the village, farmhouse buildings rise and fall in rows, the village roads wind and turn, clean and tidy, and the front and back courtyards are lush with melons, fruits and vegetables, full of spring vitality. As we walked and chatted, we learned that at the beginning of construction, Zhanqi Village also learned from the city, intending to build an urban community, and put forward the clear requirements of "gardening the community, turning farmers into residents, planting grass not vegetables, planting flowers not melons." However, not long after moving in, villagers spontaneously turned the soil and planted vegetables near their homes. At first the village committee organized people to stop them and even pull up the vegetables, but the village pulled them up in the morning and the villagers planted them again in the afternoon. Back and forth, the conflict grew bigger and bigger. After a fierce discussion at a villagers' meeting, the village finally conformed to public opinion and agreed to this practice, requiring only that flowers, grass and trees be planted near the main roads, while allowing melons and vegetables to be planted in front of and behind houses and in front and back courtyards. This made us strongly feel that if village construction loses rural characteristics and farmhouse charm, it will ultimately not be welcomed by farmers and will sooner or later fail.
Anlong Village in Ande Town is not inferior to Zhanqi Village in village construction level, but its village scale is relatively small. Anlong Village is the result of Chengdu's recent project to create "small-scale, clustered, ecological" dwellings with western Sichuan characteristics. Small-scale means respecting the laws of village form, "gathering where suitable and dispersing where suitable," and not seeking largeness and completeness in village scale. Anlong Village planned 10 new farmer communities, with the population at each point controlled at 50-400 people, and the smallest point having only 11 households and 39 people. Clustered means being enclosed by one or several courtyards of varying sizes in a clustered layout, appropriately concentrated into groups while remaining relatively independent. Ecological means fully relying on ecological elements such as forest groves, water systems and farmland, with dwellings naturally scattered among the villages, preserving the naturally beautiful ecosystem and pastoral scenery. Although Anlong Village and Zhanqi Village are both newly built rural communities, they have interdependent courtyards, abundant green melons and vegetables, old trees clustered in the forest groves, and a strong local flavor. The comrade from the Provincial Agricultural Work Committee accompanying us told us that when Sichuan promotes new village construction, it places special emphasis on preserving the front and back courtyards of dwellings and striving to display the rural area's distinctive pastoral landscape, the sounds of chickens and dogs, birdsong and flower fragrance, and the scent of melons, fruits and vegetables; it clearly requires not worshiping reinforced concrete, with the more green space in front of and behind houses the better, and the less hardening and blacktopping inside and outside the village the better. On the way, they also introduced to us the practice of "micro-pastoral fields," namely building small vegetable gardens, small orchards, small tea gardens, small fish ponds and so on in front and back courtyards to develop courtyard economies. These concepts and practices touched us deeply, and we vaguely felt that this might be a kind of "return to simplicity" after urbanization has developed to a certain degree, and might be an "ideal appearance" for new village construction in the future.
On the afternoon of April 2, we looked at several villages in Dujiangyan City, Chengdu: Heming Village and Huangjia Dayuan in Liujie Town, and Rongjia Yuanzi (a natural village) in Daqiao Village, Chongyi Town. Heming Village is a newly built village, while Huangjia Dayuan and Rongjia Yuanzi are villages that have been renovated and upgraded from existing villages. The research visit to Huangjia Dayuan was somewhat accidental. After seeing several newly built new village demonstration sites in succession, we wondered whether this was merely Chengdu's "model opera," and how other ordinary villages were doing. We asked the comrades in Dujiangyan roughly how many newly built villages there could be and what proportion they accounted for. The city comrades told us that they accounted for only about one tenth of the total number of administrative villages in the city, which meant that the vast majority of villages still retained their original village form. After finishing Heming Village, we made a temporary decision to look at a nearby old village, Huangjia Dayuan. The tidiness of Huangjia Dayuan truly exceeded our expectations. The houses were still old houses and the roads still old roads, but it just felt a bit different: not a single bit of plastic film or paper scraps could be seen on the road surface, and not a trace of livestock and poultry manure odor or rotting leaves could be smelled in the air. The renovation of Rongjia Yuanzi was also very distinctive. In one old dwelling, a gate courtyard in "thatched cottage style" was built with bamboo and grass, and it has now been converted into a comprehensive activity hall. During holidays, tourists come in an endless stream to drink tea and eat there. After seeing these villages, we were left with an extremely deep impression of the cleanliness, tidiness and fresh elegance of Chengdu's rural areas. It can be said that building villages like this is not uncommon across the country, but to tidy village appearance to this degree, many places lag far behind.
On April 3, we also researched Shangli Ancient Town in Yucheng District, Ya'an City, and Hongxing Village in Liujiang Town, Hongya County, Meishan City. These are two ancient villages with a history of over a thousand years. Relying on the natural beauty of "Misty Rain Liujiang" and the cultural heritage of "Thousand-Year Liujiang," Hongxing Village combines new rural construction with the development of rural tourism, and in new village construction places particular emphasis on the careful protection of ancient village appearance and traditional dwellings. In Hongxing Village, a stream runs through the village, and a leisure path has been built in the village. The path is both built along the stream and crosses through it, with prominent tourist signs on both sides of the road and clean public toilets built along the road. A huge old banyan tree, with dense branches and leaves, shades an old residence, and the golden signboard of "Ancient Banyan Inn" is faintly visible, truly making one feel as if walking through a painting and traveling through time. After coming to our senses, we thought carefully: if villages like these disappear in our generation, what a great sin that would be! Where would historical memory be sought? And by what would cultural nostalgia be passed on?
After seeing these villages, we felt that how villages should be built and what they should be built like cannot be generalized. Current villages can roughly be classified into three types: one is "ancient villages" with a long history and culture, one is ordinary original "old villages," and the other is "new villages" newly planned and newly built on new sites in recent years. Different types of villages should also differ in their construction ideas, priorities and practices. The construction of new villages should emphasize "building." First, in basic concept, village construction cannot simply copy urban communities into rural areas, cannot build rural areas into low-level replicas of cities, and must do everything possible to preserve the rural area's pastoral scenery, farmhouse charm and rural culture. Second, in planning and design, village planning must not only fit the texture of mountains and waters, the mechanism of roads and the geography of forests and fields and other natural features, but also possess the comfort and convenience of production and life enjoyed by modern urban civilization. Third, in dwelling construction, it is necessary to fully embody ethnic characteristics, regional features and rural traits, not only achieving roughly unified overall style and appearance, but also avoiding uniformity, and achieving diverse combinations and well-proportioned arrangements in exterior style, color and appearance. The construction of old villages should emphasize "renovation." We cannot demolish all rural areas and rebuild them once again; after all, newly built rural areas are only a minority. It should be said that village construction mainly still has to follow the path of renovation and upgrading. The renovation of old villages is not only "putting on boots and hats," changing the exterior appearance of villagers' houses, but also introducing some practices from building new villages in concepts, planning and housing construction, focusing on upgrading and renovating rural public infrastructure and optimizing and beautifying village appearance, so that life becomes more convenient and the village more beautiful. The construction of ancient villages should emphasize "protection." Ancient villages are precious heritage of our rural civilization. An ancient village is a historical exhibition hall and specimen treasure house integrating mountain and water culture, architectural culture, garden culture, celebrity culture, food culture and folk culture. In the future, old houses, old woods, old buildings and old trees in rural areas must all be treated as wealth rather than burden, and carefully tended and strictly protected.
2. On whom should villages rely to be built?
Where should houses be built? What should they be built like? Who should build them? How should they be supervised? What should be done with old homesteads? How should new houses be allocated and contracted land adjusted? The construction of a village, especially a newly built village, involves very specific contradictions and problems. If anything is slightly inappropriate, it may plant the root of disaster for rural social governance and may even become a fuse for mass incidents in rural areas. The practices of Chengdu and other places in Sichuan resonated with us, and the core principle they follow is "truly letting farmers make the decisions."
When researching in Heming Village, we suddenly saw a dilapidated house standing conspicuously in the middle of a group of new houses, very eye-catching. We asked: What is going on here? The accompanying comrade told us that at the beginning of project implementation, this household thought the village was going to take their homestead, and since they also had a house in downtown Chengdu, they firmly refused to participate in the project. The village agreed to this household's request and did not touch their house. "Now they regret it," the accompanying comrade added lightly. We felt that in carrying out new rural construction, respecting farmers' wishes may in the short term affect project progress, but allowing the "flower-insertion" phenomenon to exist can minimize hidden dangers of conflict, and the ultimate benefits are also obvious.
In the course of project implementation, Anlong Village fully upheld the principal position of farmers and did not resort to "administrative orders and making decisions on the people's behalf." First, whether to participate in the project was decided by the villagers themselves; second, the specific implementation of the project was managed by the villagers themselves, with issues such as planning and site selection, floor plan design, selection of construction teams, and quality and safety supervision all decided independently by the farmers; finally, capital accounts were also calculated and managed by the villagers themselves.
Chengdu also introduced the working mechanisms of villagers' councils and villagers' deliberative assemblies into new village construction. On April 1, when researching Hefengshui Village in Qiquan Town, Chongzhou City, Chengdu, we learned that this village encouraged farmers and the masses to establish "three assemblies and one cooperative" through democratic election, independently implement the comprehensive consolidation project of collective land, and thereby build a "1+3+n" village-level governance mechanism. They established a joint deliberative assembly, focusing on solving the problem of difficult deliberation across groups and administrative villages in new village construction; established a rights-protection self-governance association, with the masses hiring legal advisers, focusing on solving the problem of lawful rights protection; established an owners' committee, focusing on solving the problem of daily supervision in new village projects; and established a land share cooperative, focusing on solving the problem of the implementing entity for land consolidation. The practice of Hefengshui Village truly let the masses live in houses they could trust, have clear accounts, and truly have a sense of trust in the government. At the same time, Chengdu widely promoted the construction concept of "small-group living" and adopted various methods such as unified planning and unified construction, joint household co-construction, and unified planning with self-building, also giving farmers full autonomy, choice and decision-making power.
3. Where should village construction funds come from?
Doing village construction well faces a key bottleneck: lack of funds. Building villages is a large project. Not only is there a large demand for funds for infrastructure such as water, electricity, roads and gas, but housing construction is also a large investment. Where does the money come from? From the practices of the three cities of Chengdu, Ya'an and Meishan, there are various channels: government subsidies, villagers' fundraising, and market financing.
At a discussion in Wangjia Village, Baizhang Town, Mingshan District, Ya'an City, comrades from the district told us that Mingshan District is planning to carry out construction of 89 new village points, and the preliminary estimate for infrastructure investment alone requires 300 million yuan, not including villagers' housing construction costs. Wangjia Village is a "new village." The housing types for village construction include 3-person households, 5-person households and other types for villagers to choose from. The housing construction cost for a 3-person household is about 160,000 yuan, and the construction cost for a 5-person household is about 200,000 yuan. It can be seen that if farmers' housing construction costs are added, the demand for funds for village construction, especially the construction of "new villages," is enormous.
On the construction fund disclosure board in Anlong Village, we saw that the total investment in Anlong Village's new village construction was 244 million yuan, with funds coming from three sources: transaction fees for linked increase-decrease quotas, project funds, and farmers' self-raised funds. After demolishing courtyards and merging courtyards, 426 mu of collective construction land saved and restored to cultivation was used for linked increase-decrease, and at the government's storage price of 350,000 yuan/mu, it was close to 150 million yuan, accounting for more than 60% of the entire source of construction funds. In addition, the government provided supporting subsidies of 48 million yuan for infrastructure construction, and villagers also raised some themselves, with per capita self-raised funds at about 14,000 yuan. It can be seen that in new village construction, although there are government subsidies, villagers' self-raised funds and other channels, the land value premium obtained through linked increase-decrease is the main source of funds for current new village construction. In terms of the use of funds, Anlong Village's residential construction consumed 176 million yuan, accounting for more than 70%. This also shows that the demand for funds for building new villages is mainly in new residential construction. We learned that not only Anlong Village, but also Zhanqi Village, Heming Village and several other newly built villages had broadly similar sources and uses of funds.
However, the linked increase-decrease policy is not effective everywhere. Mingshan is a mountainous county and agricultural county, "weak in industry, good in tea," and primary-market demand for land is not strong, so land prices are not high. The land quotas saved through linked increase-decrease were only just over 30,000 yuan/mu, while the cost of land restoration was more than 60,000 to 70,000 yuan per mu. Therefore, the linked policy had almost no room for implementation. At a discussion at Shuxin Farm in Bifengxia Town, Yucheng District, Ya'an City, comrades from the district also told us that because linked increase-decrease of land cannot be carried out, the district now lacks funds for building new villages. We felt that once "linked increase-decrease" cannot be carried out, it is very difficult to carry out large projects such as newly built villages. This situation is probably common not only in Ya'an but across the country.
In addition to the three types of funding sources in Anlong Village, some social capital has also been invested in rural construction. However, such funds are generally relatively small and often target villages with special advantages, such as places with relatively large potential for rural tourism development, especially villages with ancient village development resources. We learned that Hongxing Village attracted 300 million yuan of social capital through models such as BT, BOT or BOO to participate in new rural construction, and completed the village's public infrastructure construction mainly with enterprise investment. Hefengshui Village's fundraising method is also a new exploration. This village is also a new village residential cluster. They converted rural collective construction land into shares to establish a land share cooperative, and the cooperative then mortgaged the members' surplus collective construction land to banks for financing of 36 million yuan, solving the problem of where the money for new village construction would come from.
Villages not only need money for construction but also for maintenance. To build beautiful and livable villages, maintaining cleanliness and tidiness seems even more important. We learned in Heming Village that last year the village had 2.5 million yuan for the management and protection of village infrastructure and the maintenance of village environmental sanitation, of which villagers themselves paid 800,000 yuan, and Chengdu City gave each village 400,000 yuan per year for social undertaking construction. Chengdu's financial strength is relatively strong, and there is more money invested in rural social undertakings, but for mountainous cities like Ya'an, the situation is much worse. At a discussion in Mingshan District, village comrades reported to us that as of now, although Ya'an has a plan for the city to give each village 100,000 yuan and the district to give 200,000 yuan, it still has not been allocated and implemented.
4. Some preliminary reflections and judgments
Village construction, like urban construction, is a major theoretical issue and practical problem that must be faced in the process of modernization. Through several days of field research in multiple villages in 3 cities in Sichuan, and through discussions with many grassroots cadres and farmers, we have formed some basic judgments and preliminary considerations on the issue of village construction.
1. On the trend of village transformation. Against the background of rapid industrialization and urbanization, accompanied by the large-scale transfer of rural population, more and more farmers are entering cities, obtaining household registration and becoming urban residents, which indicates that China's village layout structure and rural social form are undergoing profound changes and drastic transformation. At present, the following trends can be seen: First, the "hollowing out" of traditional villages will continue to develop, rural areas in the suburbs of cities will be rapidly incorporated into the urban map, rural populations in agricultural areas and mountainous areas will gradually gather into new rural communities and central villages, and it is an inevitable trend that some villages will gradually disappear and the number of villages will increasingly decrease. Second, after a period in which urban and rural construction land expansion proceeded rapidly at the same time, with the implementation of the urbanization strategy centered on population urbanization, we may now be entering a turning point, indicating that future urban spatial expansion will be accompanied by the compression of village space, and the overall growth rate of construction land scale will gradually slow until basically stable. Third, the process of integrated urban-rural development will accelerate, rural infrastructure and public services will gradually catch up with cities, and large-scale village construction, village renovation and village improvement will gradually unfold.
2. On village construction planning. In doing village planning, one cannot simply copy the urban community model and build rural areas into shrunken cities, nor can everything be uniform, one blueprint, one appearance. In doing village planning, it is necessary to take cities and counties as units, follow the positioning of main functional zones and the concept of unified planning across the whole area, focus on regional leading industries, formulate an overall plan for county-level village construction, and, in combination with the specific functional positioning of each village, prepare village construction plans, building where suitable, renovating where suitable, and protecting where suitable, achieving adaptation to local conditions and differentiated treatment. In doing village planning, it is necessary to take facilitating farmers' production and life as the basic basis, respect the traditional rural structure, farmers' way of life and local ethnic customs, and build villages large where suitable and small where suitable, gathering where suitable and dispersing where suitable. It is not permissible to force concentrated living, still less to force farmers to "go upstairs." In doing village planning, the government is the leader and should provide money and effort, but after all it is farmers who live in the villages, and village planning must fully solicit farmers' opinions.
3. On village construction and renovation. Looking now, some places have the conditions for village demolition and reconstruction, and farmers also have the willingness, so guidance and promotion can be carried out in light of the situation. But for most areas, village renovation and village environmental improvement are still the primary task at present. In farmers' words, "let the city daughter-in-law be able to stay in the village and stay for a few days." Village construction and village renovation are, in the final analysis, farmers' own business. Whether to build, how to build, and what to build it like still have to be decided by the farmers themselves. When the government does good deeds, it must also make farmers satisfied. It cannot overstep its position, doing thankless work and spending money only to incur complaints.
4. On village construction funds. Village construction requires large amounts of investment. For infrastructure and public service facilities, the government should invest what it should invest and subsidize what it should subsidize, but the bulk is building houses, which still depends on farmers themselves paying. From the research in Sichuan, in carrying out new village construction, there are post-disaster reconstruction, poverty alleviation relocation, and bundled rural construction funds of various kinds, but the most important is still "land tickets" (funds from the circulation of urban-rural linked increase-decrease quotas). For example, if a village can save more than 300 mu of construction land quotas through demolishing old villages and building new ones and land restoration and consolidation, then after the quotas are circulated it can obtain more than 100 million yuan in funds. Relying on government investment and farmers' fundraising, it would be very difficult to achieve this. On the policy of linked increase-decrease of land, all parties have considerable disputes and differing understandings. We believe that, objectively speaking, "linked increase-decrease" has some benefits, especially for rural areas in most agricultural areas and remote mountainous areas, which may never be expropriated or urbanized. Through linked increase-decrease, they can partially share in the land value-added benefits brought by urbanization and obtain construction funds in advance. At the same time, through the restoration of old villages, a portion of cultivated land can be increased, and to a certain extent the level of intensive and economical use of rural collective construction land can also be raised. The current problem is that the management of "linked increase-decrease" has somewhat spun out of control: approved implementation scale has been blindly expanded, and unapproved implementation has also been carried out without authorization. The consequence is that the national annual construction land quota exceeds the macro-control target, and no one can say clearly exactly how much it exceeds. Moreover, some local governments carry out "linked increase-decrease" under the banner of new rural construction when in fact what they want is urban construction land quotas, forcibly demolishing villages and merging villages, forcing farmers to go upstairs, triggering a series of social problems. Rather than this, it would be better to realistically and appropriately increase the annual construction land quota, correspondingly expand the turnover construction land quota for linked increase-decrease, bring all construction land occupation under annual construction land quota management, turn hidden operations under the table into open and transparent actions on the table, and promote "linked increase-decrease" in a standardized and orderly manner. If a major policy adjustment is temporarily difficult, at least the following points should be firmly grasped: First, quotas must not be transferred out of the county; second, real estate must not be developed; third, the money from selling quotas must be ensured to be basically used for new village construction itself.